“You’re a celebrity now, Mr. Tolliver. A big shot. Be happy you can keep your bratwurst dry.”
“I don’t mean to complain. I realize that would be stupid.”
“Well! As long as you realize that,” she said brightly. “I’ll have somebody look at the gutters tomorrow.”
The connubial turn in their relationship had come on so gradually, with so little fuss, that he’d barely taken note of the shift. She’s adopted me, my father would say to himself, on those rare occasions when it crossed his mind. She’s taken me in. Until the day I was born, Mrs. Haven — and for quite some time thereafter, to be honest — Orson thought of himself less as Ursula’s lover than as a prematurely aged foster child.
“Bratwursts or no bratwursts, Ursula, something needs to be done. About this review, I mean. About all the reviews.”
Ursula sighed to herself.
“I’ll add a fourth book,” said Orson. “An appendix, for the paperback edition. To make my meaning absolutely clear.”
“You can’t explain your own novel, Orson. That’s a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
She shook her curls at him. “Artists do not explain.”
“You may not have noticed, Fräulein Kimmelmann, but I’m not in the art business. I write ‘speculative pornography for the pulps.’”
“You’ll end up making a philosophy out of this, if you’re not careful.” She gave a small, involuntary shudder. “Or even a religion.”
“There’s always room for one more religion in this country, sweetheart.” He caught her by the waist. “That’s why the devil made America so big.”
* * *
The Excuse sold fifty thousand copies in its first six weeks of publication, and Orson bought a Buick hardtop with the money. He also bought a color TV in a tropical hardwood cabinet, twelve identical herringbone suits, and a dozen turtlenecks in varying shades of blue, from powder to navy to midnight. The suits became my father’s uniform, his protest against being cast as a hippie, disdain for his fanbase expressed in brushed cotton and tweed. The rest of the money went to Ursula, to spend or squirrel away or set on fire, as she saw fit.
They were married before a justice of the peace in a joyless little courthouse in Niagara Falls, with Uncle Wilhelm and one of Ursula’s former classmates as witnesses. There was no time for a honeymoon, since Orson was struggling with the postscript for the paperback edition of The Excuse—the explanation Ursula was so opposed to — which was already months overdue. His new bride pursed her lips and closed her eyes and smoothed down her dress to hide her disappointment. (I know she did all these things, Mrs. Haven, because I saw her do them at regular intervals throughout my youth.) She’d been hoping they might travel to Vienna, to visit her mother; it had been almost two years since she’d seen her. Orson promised they’d go in the spring.
Enzian and Gentian sent a box of calla lilies to the ceremony but declined to attend. They’d divined The Excuse’s true message, unlike everyone else, and the result was exactly as their sister-in-law had predicted. For seventeen months they sent no word at all, not even a Hanukkah card. It was only a year and a half later, once perfunctory contact had been restored — due entirely to Ursula’s efforts — that the full extent of the damage became clear.
Orson had known from the start that his book would seem a willful perversion of Enzie’s ambitions for him: instead of using his talent to disseminate her ideas (however cunningly camouflaged) among the masses, he’d made a travesty of her life’s work, to say nothing of her beliefs, and encouraged the masses to laugh. He’d tried to free himself once before, by escaping to New York; this time there would be no miscalculation, no variable left unaccounted for. He’d made a deliberate decision to cut the cord between them permanently.
Nevertheless, perverse as it might seem, his sisters’ silence left him at a loss. Orson could easily imagine Enzie resolving to blacklist him, but he couldn’t see Genny agreeing — not without considerable pain. He’d somehow never asked himself what Genny’s reaction to the novel might be, only Enzie’s; and the lack of contact with her gnawed at the root of his well-being. In spite of his presence on various bestseller lists (thirty weeks in The New York Times Book Review; top slot: #3), he felt trivial and neglected and alone. The only evidence that his sisters were still alive came via Smith Copley-Sexton, the CFO of Warranted Tolliver Timepieces. Their checks, Sexton assured him, were still being cashed.
* * *
If my father had known the details of his sisters’ lives at the time, Mrs. Haven, he might not have taken things so personally, though he’d probably have been a great deal more concerned. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the publication of The Excuse ushered in the third and closing act of Enzie and Genny’s opera for two voices, the act that established its genre — which until then had been anybody’s guess — as tabloid tragedy.
The final Wednesday dinner was held on May 10, 1970, six months before I was born. Eighty-eight guests attended, including Julius Erving, Susan Sarandon, Klaus Nomi and Marianne Moore. It had become tradition for a lecture to be given between the dessert and the digestif, and on this occasion — which none among the revelers guessed would be their last — it was delivered by a young dermatologist, Jonathan P. Zizmor, on the use of fruit acids in cleansing the skin. The dishes included, but were not limited to: smoked bluepoint oysters, chicken liver pâté, french fries, sauerkraut, Waldorf salad, blackened red snapper, pickled hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, stuffed grape leaves, lasagna, garlic bread, tapioca pudding, mint Girl Scout cookies and chocolate mousse. When questioned about the meal — which was a bit on the showy side, even by their standards — Genny admitted, blushingly, that it was in honor of Enzie’s birthday, a claim Enzie neither confirmed nor denied.
Enzie’s health was duly toasted, then Genny’s own, since they’d been born within an hour of each other. The meal lasted until 03:00 or 03:30 EST, depending on accounts, at which point Enzie announced that she and her sister needed to retire. After the eighty-eighth guest — a Dominican client liaison for the Monsanto Fruit Corporation — had been shown to the door, my aunts pushed it shut together (with a quiet flourish, I like to imagine) and turned to regard the sea of dirty china. Genny heaved a theatrical sigh.
“All right?” Enzie asked.
Genny nodded. “It’s all right, Enzie. It’s enough.”
“I’m happy to hear it.” She smiled. “It’s almost time for us to go to Znojmo.”
“Goodness!” said Genny. “Is it May already?”
“It is, Schätzchen. We have an appointment to keep.”
Incredibly, my aunts did travel to Znojmo the following month, for what they described to Ursula — in a characteristically oblique postcard — as a “sentimental spree.” They spent less than two days in Moravia, according to their itinerary, followed by a single afternoon in the city of their birth. Then they boarded Pan Am 225 from Vienna to New York, returned to their apartment in the General Lee, and pushed all seven deadbolts closed behind them. Orson would eventually be drawn back into their orbit, but no one else — with one exception — would cross their threshold for the whole of the next decade. And that exception, Mrs. Haven, was me.
* * *
On May 10, 1970—the same day, as chance and fate and Providence would have it, as the Tolliver Sisters’ last supper — the bell rang just as Ursula was pulling a tray of Topfenstrudel out of the oven. Orson was in the kitchen as well, staring at the back of his wife’s head with his mouth hanging open. He’d just received some unexpected news.